A leading university is to become the first in Britain to scrap traditional
degree classifications.

University College London will stop telling students whether they have received a first, second or third, and instead given them an American-style "grade point average".

It gives students a score based on all the courses they have taken as undergraduates.

The move comes after "award inflation" which has undermined the traditional undergraduate degree classification.

Official figures showed almost two-thirds of students gained a first or upper-second class degree in 2010. Some 46,825 students – one in seven – were awarded first class degrees by UK universities, double the number a decade ago.

Malcolm Grant, the Provost of UCL, said that the honours degree classification was no longer capable of providing the information that students deserve and employers require.

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"There is clearly award inflation," he said. "The public assumes there is a national exam process but there is not. Every institution determines its own proportion of grades. Perversely, award inflation has been fuelled by league tables which give points to those universities with higher proportions of the top grades.

"Award inflation over the past three decades has led to student performance being essentially recognised by classification into only two main groups first class and upper second class honours. It is a crude and undistinguished model."

The Provost said that the UK system was not well recognised around the world and that a form of grade point average (GPA) would "ensure that our students' mode of study is internationally recognised."

The university, ranked 20th in the world and third in Europe in the 2011 Academic Ranking of World Universities, will develop and pilot its own model of GPA next year, and if successful, adopt the new approach to reporting academic achievement.

Calls for a reform of degree grades have grown in recent years. They have been fuelled by a series of university whistleblowers who claim external examiners have been "leaned on" to boost grades.

One former academic said lecturers were under pressure to "mark positively" and turn a blind eye to plagiarism – helping universities climb national league tables.

Universities are currently trialling a graduate "report card", called the Higher Education Achievement Report. It is intended to represent a more accurate picture of students' achievements while also including an overall degree classification.

A Sunday Telegraph investigation earlier this year found that the universities awarding the highest proportion of firsts or 2:1s last year were Exeter, where 82 per cent of graduates received the top degrees compared with just 29 per cent in 1970, and St Andrews – Scotland's oldest university, where Prince William met Kate Middleton – where the figure was also 82 per cent compared with just 25 per cent in 1970.

Imperial College London and Warwick both granted 80 per cent firsts or 2:1s last year, compared with 49 per cent and 39 per cent respectively in 1970.

At Bath University the figure was 76 per cent last year compared with just 35 per cent in 1970.

Many blue-chip companies will only interview graduates with a first or a 2:1. A top-class degree also makes it much easier to get a scholarship for postgraduate research.

According to Professor Nigel Seaton, a senior deputy vice-chancellor at Surrey University, the current degree classification is unfair to some students.

He said the difference in academic achievement between a student with a 2:1 and one with a 2:2 might be almost nothing – 60.1% compared with 59.9%, for instance.

“In such a case, the difference in life chances reflects no difference at all in academic achievement,” he said.

A report by a committee of MPs in to higher education standards found that different universities demand “different levels of effort” from students to get similar degrees, suggesting that top grades from some colleges were not worth the same as others.